


Reconstruction

by breathedout



Series: Widows' Walks [2]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Recovery, murderous ex girlfriends, that awesome plan natasha had where she kidnapped her girlfriend for an extreme makeover, worked out about as well as you'd expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 21:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11609271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: They did a decent job putting her back together, anyway.





	Reconstruction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadaras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/gifts).



> Written for a prompt by [shadaras](http://shadaras.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr:
>
>> kintsugi (which you should look up; roughly, to my understanding, it's the art of repairing broken things in a beautiful way that honors their breakage); Natasha/any other woman you find compelling
> 
> Could there be a more perfect Natasha/Yelena prompt??
> 
> This turned out more comics-verse than MCU, both because Yelena hasn't (to my knowledge) made a screen appearance, and also because I can't really see MCU-Natasha doing anything quite so bananacakes as convincing Tony Stark to host and bankroll partially-nonconsensual plastic surgery to enable her to temporarily swap identities with her sexually-charged nemesis. (Which is what canonically happens in the comic _Breakdown_.)
> 
> Set after _Breakdown_. A sequel of sorts to [The Grand Tour](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2465753). As you will be able to tell from the ending, there's also another installment in the works, which I ran out of time for this morning.

### October 1999

They did a decent job putting her back together, anyway. Considering the rush job; considering the extreme nature of the work involved; considering that only a few weeks had gone by between the first pair of surgeries and the second. Considering Stark Industries wasn't exactly in the people business; and Natasha and Yelena weren't quite yet machines.

The day after they cleared her for release, Natasha went out to the Chelsea flea market and bought a free-standing floor mirror. It was the old-fashioned kind: cherry-wood stand with two forked feet; oval glass that pivoted on screws. The wood was scuffed; the glass a bit scratched; she bargained the old man down on the price and amused herself with his grumbling; with her show of pleasure at the bargain. Then she brought it home and put it by her closet, in front of the wall mirror she'd affixed years ago. But every night, for a while there, she would first close the living room curtains and then drag the mirror into the bathroom. She would sit on the lip of her old clawfoot tub, and look at her old self in her old flea-market mirror. 

By the time two weeks had gone by, almost nothing was visible from the operations at all. 

Natasha felt later, and maybe even at the time, that she ought to have been able to hold this solitary ritual openly, in her living room, with the curtains open. Or at least in her bedroom, by the illumination of light pollution from the seventh-storey window that gave on Tompkins Square Park. It was a weakness, she knew, to suppose that one was ever, in any room or any life, reliably off-stage. 

But still, she hid out in her bathroom. She sat on the lip of her tub and watched the swelling deflate and the bruising disappear around her nose and her eyes and her jaw. She watched the mottled purple fade to queasy olive drab at the sides of her breasts, once again heavy. _Stark_ , she thought, and shook her head; for they hadn't restored her stretch marks to her, had they? They hadn't put back into her thighs or her hips the flesh they'd suctioned off to make her Yelena. And they'd never given her Yelena's knife scar, had they? Stark, she thought, and she thought: men; and she touched her belly, where in another life the baby had kicked her from inside. Months ago, when their foreplay had still hinted at murder, Yelena had wrestled Natasha to the ground and put a knife to her throat, and Natasha had willed her to press but instead Yelena had run away. Left her. Natasha found herself wishing she had that scar, at least; but Yelena had barely drawn blood. 

So Natasha would sit there, naked on the lip of her tub, and think: it's like it never happened. Like none of it ever happened. 

And she would think: I'll never see Yelena again.

### February 2001

A little over a year later, without really deciding to, she tracked Yelena to the girl's new apartment in Miami.

Natasha was too old to be much surprised at herself. She had to know—

And anyway. Anyway, Yelena now had a designer wardrobe and her own modelling agency, and an Afghan hound which sat in the passenger's seat of her cherry-red 1967 Karmann Ghia convertible. She still moved incisively, precisely; no retired glamor-girl languidness for Natasha's Yelena. Yet, that was exactly what she was: retired. Natasha crawled into the —unprotected!—air shaft of Yelena's building, and through the vent to Yelena's room watched Yelena kiss goodbye the suited, slicked-down man who had just taken her to dinner. She watched Yelena shut the door. Watched her triple-bolt it. She watched her put a hand to the back of her neck, where her hair had used to curl, child-soft. Natasha remembered grabbing those curls. She remembered yanking Yelena's head back by her hair to kiss her. To slap her. Remembered nuzzling her face into the skin there and breathing in Yelena's black-tea sweat. 

For a moment Yelena just stood there, in the silence. Natasha imagined, though she couldn't see, that Yelena had shut her eyes. 

Natasha watched Yelena press the message button on her machine. Together, in a manner of speaking, they listened to Yelena's next-in-command at the agency tell her about a shoot in Mexico DF to which she was hoping to send Simone, if Yelena didn't think it better to give Gloria the opportunity. This could mean a lot to Gloria, said the woman's voice, tinny through the little speaker, whereas we can always find work for Simone; as Natasha watched Yelena kick off her pumps and unzip her dress, letting it fall to the floor in the doorway as she padded into the other room. 

They'd patched them up in the same room, with the same medical staff, Tony had assured Natasha. But Yelena, without the serum, in her boy-cut underpants and her little blue camisole, had shiny pink fault lines still. Natasha could make then out on her chest and her legs. She probably had them on her belly, too. Natasha pressed her hands against the cold metal of the vent, feeling furiously, irrationally, _jealous_ —and craving, at the same time, to lift up the hem of Yelena's shirt; to put her cheek, her tongue, her forehead against those shining seams. Close up, she might see them even in Yelena's face: the places where the two of them, briefly, had been stitched into each others' skins.

Natasha closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Yelena was in the kitchen, standing with the refrigerator door open. The big sleek dog stood at her hip, its nose pointed toward the meat drawer.

These days Yelena drank, Natasha learned, from her spot in the air duct. She watched her, in front of her wood-grained cabinets, doctoring up a white wine concoction with a splash of orange juice and a sprig of mint, and then padding back into the living room with her glass in her hand and her dog ambling blondly after. Would Natasha have felt better or worse had it been vodka? She herself preferred a Nebbiolo to anything Russian. And anyway: when Yelena's glass was empty she refilled it with water, and fetched her briefcase from the shelf by the door. 

She propped herself up with couch cushions and stretched her legs out in front of her, with her papers in her lap. The dog, in an arc of gangling legs, bounded up next to her on the couch, despite the light upholstery; despite the lack of space. Yelena laughed, raising the papers up to stop them being scattered. The dog draped itself over her calves. It wedged its nose between the couch cushion and her knee, and Yelena asked it sternly if it was finished. It sighed, deeply. She lowered the papers again, her pen between her teeth.

Yelena was retired now, Natasha thought, watching her scratch with one hand at a silky Afghan ear. She was retired; and she was alive; and she had a job. Natasha had done what she needed to do.

### December 2020

In a silo in Svalbard Natasha, one against three, kicked out; turned; kicked again; the bigger of the two men was clutching at his stomach but the smaller one was still coming at her. Rounds fired from her cuff; miss; cuff; chest hit and he staggered; neatly she pivoted; flipped; took down the first via her thighs around his neck and with a twist of his neck he lay out under her, still. She sprang to her feet. The man who'd taken her hit to his chest was curled on his side, some way off, gasping. The third figure, the woman, hadn't moved at all. Why wouldn't she have done? And Natasha in the moment, in that, in that moment—

Yelena reached up to the base of her neck and stripped off her balaclava. Natasha, who a minute before had kept hold of the little vial with one hand while fighting off a pair of trained fighters twice her weight, heard vaguely the clink of glass on the floor. 

Blonde curls, soaked dark with sweat. That upturned nose which had once, for a nightmare fortnight, been Natasha's nose. Those little hips and the little breasts in the black catsuit; and now that Yelena was walking toward her, the unmistakeable, unmissable way she moved. Only now—

Natasha reached back. Staggered back. Reached for something. Her back hit an old water tank and the hollow metal jolted. Echoed. She couldn't get her breath. 

Yelena's mouth curved up. She kept advancing. She had moved just like that in Havana, getting out of her Karmann Ghia with her dog. For _years_ Natasha, when she couldn't sleep, had thought about that fucking dog. For God's sake, Natasha thought, it had worn goggles; as Yelena with her old new face came even with her, and pinned Natasha's shoulder to the water tank with an elbow. The dog, Natasha's brain repeated, dumbly. The goggles. The convertible. The briefcase with the papers. A splash of orange juice and a sprig of mint in a single glass of white wine. Yelena had never held a candle to Natasha in stagecraft. But then: she'd had twenty years to learn. 

Yelena tipped her head up and Natasha could still make out faint white surgical scarring, running the length of her jaw. But more than that, what time had done. All the childlike roundness had been stripped off Yelena's cheeks. Her eyelids were thinner, Natasha thought; and her mouth severe; and around her lips a faint feathering. That mouth dragged up at the corner and the satisfaction wasn't new but the cruelty there—

Yelena took from her belt a short black dagger and didn't hesitate; didn't run. She raised the thing and slashed diagonally across Natasha's face, from hairline to jaw, as Natasha stood there, shocked stupid, open-mouthed.

The pain seared. Burned. Her body tried to curl in on itself, but Yelena held her up against the water tank and kissed her once, brutal, right where her knife had sliced open Natasha's lip. 

Then she let her fall. Gathered up the vial, and shot her compatriot in the head; and walked away.

### May 2047

Right after their reciprocal transformation, Matt had said, "She'll never forgive you, you know." 

This reoccurred to Natasha, from time to time. 

For a while she argued to herself that it was true, and should be true; that she hoped and expected it to be true. Later she dreaded the truth of it. Later still she could believe anything of anyone, and didn't know what to hope for. After Svalbard she managed to stay away from Yelena, more or less; and that, at least, she could be confident was the right thing.

As it turned out, by the spring when Yelena tracked her down of her own free will, even Natasha had a hard time passing for twenty; and she had given up speculating, one way or the other, some years before.


End file.
